From Maputo to Malabo: Public Agricultural Spending and Food Security in Africa

Charlotte Sers and Mazhar Mughal
Additional contact information
Charlotte Sers: ESC PAU - Ecole Supérieure de Commerce, Pau Business School

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Africa is the world's biggest battleground in the fight against hunger. African governments and the international development community have increasingly focused on finding ways and means to end hunger and ensure the right to food to the continent's burgeoning population. Public spending on agriculture is one such measure. This study examines the role government spending on agriculture has played in enhancing Africa's state of food security during the past 25 years. We examine whether this relationship varies over time and space. We explore various aspects of food security and check whether spending on research and development follows the same patterns as the overall public agriculture spending. We find little evidence of significant beneficial effects of public agricultural spending on food security as a whole. However, food security has improved in countries which spend more on agriculture. Spending on agricultural research and development too has shown a useful impact on Africa's food security. There also exists some evidence in favour of public spending's size and time effects. We conclude that the commitment by African government in the Maputo Declaration to allocate 10% of public spending to agriculture appears to be pertinent. JEL Classifications: 011, 055, Q18

Keywords: public agricultural spending; food security; undernutrition; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01844094
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01844094/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: From Maputo to Malabo: public agricultural spending and food security in Africa (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01844094

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().